How a Dallas Shop Girl is Modernizing a Quintessential Local Jewelry Boutique — and Continuing Its Legacy

Joanne and Charles Teichman launched Ylang 23 as a freestanding boutique focusing on costume jewelry at Galleria Dallas in 1985. The next year, their daughter, Alysa, was born. “It was the center of my orbit,” Alysa says of the store, where she would spend most of her time after school and on weekends. “As many entrepreneurs do, my parents worked from open to close when they started. I really grew up in the business.”

Alysa worked as a shop girl over holiday breaks while she was studying at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and while she loved selling, she never considered a full-time career with the family business. But after graduating in 2009, she realized retail was in her blood. She completed the executive training program at Fossil in Richardson before moving to New York City to manage ecommerce for bastion of prep Jack Rogers.

“I learned so much about running and growing a digital business,” says Alysa, who brought that knowledge back to Ylang 23, taking over digital operations while attending graduate school at New York University. At this point, the store moved from Galleria Dallas to its current location in The Plaza at Preston Center. After graduating with an MBA in 2016, it all came full circle: Alysa moved back to Dallas as Ylang 23’s vice president of business development and hasn’t looked back.

“This is the first time I’ve thought, ‘This is it. This is what I’m going to do,’” she says.

Alysa’s role encompasses everything strategic and forward-looking for the brand, which now specializes in high end designer jewelry. She is often on the road traveling to New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas multiple times a year to source new merchandise. Since taking on her full-time role, Teichman has launched THENEXTNOW, an emerging designer competition that builds upon her parents’ legacy of mentoring up-and-coming design talent. She also spearheaded monthly ear-piercing events that have upped the brand’s edgy-cool factor.

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Returning home to help run the family business has made Alysa realize the larger notion of family that comes with running a retail operation as robust as Ylang 23 — one that goes far beyond working with her parents each day.

“I’m really close with many of the designers we work with. We’ve carried some lines like Cathy Waterman and Ten Thousand Things for more than 20 years,” she says. “When I was living in New York, David [Rees] from Ten Thousand Things came and looked at apartments with me. He’s like my big brother.”

Last summer, she visited Greek designer Lito at her home in Athens, and was recently in London spending time with new designer Carolina Bucci.

“We’re proud of what we do and we — my parents and I — really value having amazing personal relationships with our designers, our team, and our clients,” she says. “We’re very lucky in that way.”